To have good communities, we must balance freedoms

“The world at your doorstep.” That was the postwar motto of the Dallas Morning News and many other newspapers. The phrase evokes home movie-like memories of bicycling delivery kids tossing newspapers onto the porches of new dreamland America neighborhoods.

Today, the phrase could be used by the online companies that facilitate short-term rentals of our neighborhood homes. With their help, it’s not newspapers, but world travelers who are showing up on our doorsteps.

“A man’s home is his castle,” went the old saying, with more than a hint of patriarchal self-parody. Anyway, those castles are now less Norman Rockwell-ish and more Milton Friedman-ish. Call them Castles in the Airbnb. They aren’t sanctuaries; they’re profit centers.

There’s quite a fight brewing over the regulation of these new industries. In many cases, it pits neighbor against neighbor. One family’s sanctuary is being disrupted by another family’s profit center. Folks moved to a quiet Austin neighborhood only to discover the house on their right was the compass rose for South by Southwest. For a couple of weeks, the whole world seemed to be dancing in the driveway next door.

Consequently, many cities have moved to regulate this adolescent industry. Austin, for instance, wants to require owners to live somewhere on the property if they are involved in short-term rentals. This is to protect neighborhoods from industrial-sized, big-developer driven, short-term rental invasions of otherwise quiet neighborhoods.

Texas’ Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton has joined a conservative group’s lawsuit challenging Austin’s regulations. And, in a recent related case, the state Supreme Court tossed out as unconstitutional a San Antonio-area homeowners association’s regulation of short-term rentals.

Republicans in state governments around the country want to limit cities’ abilities to regulate this new industry. It’s part of the GOP effort to diminish or eliminate local control over everything, from local taxes, to ride shares, to environmental protections.

There are census blocks full of ironies in the GOP effort. Isn’t it the Republicans who keep promising to return us to the safe and cozy homes of yesteryear, a time of permanently sunny family paradises where both lawns and residents were well- and conservatively coiffed?

One of the ironies, of course, is that short-term rentals could bring more diversity, at least transiently, to currently homogeneous neighborhoods. Diversification of our neighborhoods has never been a Republican priority, to say the least.

Short-term rentals bring up an issue we are dealing with on many levels these days.

For instance, some groups on the Christian Right say the Constitution grants them the freedom to discriminate against others based on their beliefs, while traditionally the First Amendment is read as protecting citizens from religious persecution in the political sphere.

In the case of short-term rentals, right-wing groups and Republican officials insist that homeowners should be allowed to do with their property what they want, regardless of the impact on neighbors.

These kinds of disputes are precisely what government was invented to mediate in the first place. Long ago and far away, governance was all about one family living in one grassland tent. Then, things got complicated enough that one tent had to negotiate plans with the tent next door. Politics and community government was born.

That’s something of a “just so” story, but its point is true: Democratic governance is all about our responsibility for ourselves and for each other. Our freedoms “to” must be balanced against others’ freedoms “from.”

An absolute right to use one’s property as one would like to must be balanced against one’s neighbor’s right to be free from undo annoyance or destruction. Homeowners ought to be able to turn a buck on their property if it can be done without hurting their neighbors.

In the Trump era, America can’t seem to get along with its global neighbors. It’s no wonder that closer to our homes, the cool idea of short-term rentals managed by innovative online companies has caused so much controversy. “Neighbor” used to be a term of endearment. Does anyone say, “Howdy, neighbor!” anymore?